Female Scholars of Islam

[BarakzaiAbdali]

I am not blind towards the biological gender differences. Man and woman have many physiological, morphological and even psychological differences but all these differences do not make woman inferior to man or the other way round. What I stress that nurture is more important than nature.

Woman having different genital organs does not make her inferior so that she should be maintained by men. Please admit this simple fact that the real power is financial power, rest are symbolic. A woman having her own money will feel more confident than the one always depending for a penny on her male husband or father.

There is a trend that conservative people appeal to biological factors as brain structure, evolution, genetics, hormones, or neurotransmitters as opposed to sociocultural factors as education, family, resources, environment, upbringing which is more preferred by liberals. Have an experiment that when a girl is born and you do not call her you are a girl but a boy then apart from her physical differences her behavior and strengths will be like a boy.

In a typical village in the rural areas of kandahar in 1950s I can imagine that a woman could move around freely working in fields and with herds of animals without any burka or veil. I visited the rural areas of kandahar few years back and even today where Taliban do not have control or Mullah is not very strong women can be seen in streets and few fields. Yes they did not have in past and today the liberties of a western woman who can befriend a male and can exchange jokes and merry making but woman was not that much secluded in past as it is now because of Islam or Islamism.

So once again, please carry this discussion on With Dr. Saleh Muhammad Zeary who was a die hard marxist and governmental official of Najib and appears to disagree with your assessment about some sort of Zia era Islamisazation.

I prefer you write to him and get a response from him. He has no reason to be biased.

Dr. Zeary was closer to Najib than anyone at that point and remains a believer in his philosophies - which is why he is one of your favorite people and deserves your ear.

[Badlun]

I am not a Marxist. I am not communist. I like Najib being a Pashtun Afghan secular leader not for being communist. I prefer Najib to Mulla Omar and I prefer Karzai to Najib.

Zeary do have a point and Pashtuns are voluntary Taliban and this is why today Islamism, wahabism, Salafism, Al qaeda and Taliban are stronger amongst Pashtuns than other people but in case of women Pashtun conservatism became further hardened after Islam or Islamism.

The issue is that Pashtunwali can be reformed, can be amended and things will change with modern education and democracy but not the so called divine injunctions which clearly discriminates human beings by gender and distribution of roles as bread earners and dependents.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

I am not a Marxist. I am not communist. I like Najib being a Pashtun Afghan secular leader not for being communist. I prefer Najib to Mulla Omar and I prefer Karzai to Najib.

Zeary do have a point and Pashtuns are voluntary Taliban and this is why today Islamism, wahabism, Salafism, Al qaeda and Taliban are stronger amongst Pashtuns than other people but in case of women Pashtun conservatism became further hardened after Islam or Islamism.

The issue is that Pashtunwali can be reformed, can be amended and things will change with modern education and democracy but not the so called divine injunctions which clearly discriminates human beings by gender and distribution of roles as bread earners and dependents.

Reformed internally, not through the barrell end of the gun. Regarding gender distribution and economics, as I said before you are speaking without any evidence basis even regarding the economics. There subtleties that you gloss over due, once again to your adherence to secular miltant mantra as opposed to a critical analysis.

Take for instance the economics of the field that I work in. An American female physician wrote an article regarding the American Physician Shortage. One of the things that this female specialist writes about is the self inflicted wounds being put upon the quality and quantity of care being delivered to Americans in the era of physician shortages. She hones in on the female productivity issue.

A part of this is admittedly American Physicians purposefully limiting the number of spots to control the supply demand ratio to keep salaries healthy - but at the same time most medical colleges and residencies are sort of "Quota" driven to have 50% females.

Here is what Dr. Karen Sibert says about this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/opinion/12sibert.html?pagewanted=all

"But the productivity of the doctors currently practicing is also an important factor. About 30 percent of doctors in the United States are female, and women received 48 percent of the medical degrees awarded in 2010. But their productivity doesn’t match that of men. In a 2006 survey by the American Medical Association and the Association of American Medical Colleges, even full-time female doctors reported working on average 4.5 fewer hours each week and seeing fewer patients than their male colleagues. The American Academy of Pediatrics estimates that 71 percent of female pediatricians take extended leave at some point — five times higher than the percentage for male pediatricians."

she goes on to say:

"Today, however, increasing numbers of doctors — mostly women — decide to work part time or leave the profession. Since 2005 the part-time physician workforce has expanded by 62 percent, according to recent survey data from the American Medical Group Association, with nearly 4 in 10 female doctors between the ages of 35 and 44 reporting in 2010 that they worked part time.This may seem like a personal decision, but it has serious consequences for patients and the public.


So now how is this affecting American economic health?

"Medical education is supported by federal and state tax money both at the university level — student tuition doesn’t come close to covering the schools’ costs — and at the teaching hospitals where residents are trained. So if doctors aren’t making full use of their training, taxpayers are losing their investment. With a growing shortage of doctors in America, we can no longer afford to continue training doctors who don’t spend their careers in the full-time practice of medicine."

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This piece is not written by Karen-ullah Sibertzadah or some Islamist, its written by an American anesthesiologist dedicated to her profession.

This is like the time you argued about clothes and said that because Muslims wear loose clothing they are geared to be lazy. Its pretty much continued proof that your militant secularist ideology guides your logic, not vice versa.

A simple response to that argument is the fact that doctors wear scrubs, a loose article of clothing akin to kortha partug/ paraan tumbaan day in and day out. The American physician is probably the hardest working in the world despite his "loose clothing."

So rather it is not conservatives citing gender differences in biology and physique, but rather conservatives being more logical, evidence based, and connecting biology to economic phenoma versus the secular militant approach of trying to justify attacking tradition and/or Islam and citing economic invalidated cliches.